II
--1 o EDA.,OR..
"Pass me another gray. "
.
with rare exceptions, Litton started two
to five minutes behind the leaders. In a
crowded field, wouldn't a swift runner
want to avoid weaving through clusters of
slower runners?
A Google search led Strode to a Web
site for the dental practice of Kip Litton,
D.D.S., in Davison, Michigan. It also led
to Worldrecordrun, a site, conceived and
maintained by Litton, that chronicled his
peripatetic habits. "World record" appar-
ently referred to his goal of running sub-
three- hour marathons in all fifty states.
The quest had formally begun at a mara-
thon in Traverse City, Michigan, in May,
2009, and Montana was his fourteenth
destination. On the site, Litton had posted
his finishing times and a recap of each
race. He explained that his training regi-
men and diet, along with nutritional sup-
plements, had "allowed me to maintain
my rigorous schedule and even improve
my recent performances." His tone was
alternately hortatory ("Imagine Inspire
Impact!") and emotional ("I have been
blessed with the greatest wife and kids a
guy could ever ask for").
'Who is Kip Litton?" he asked. "I am
a lifelong resident of Michigan and an
alumnus of both The UniversityofMich-
igan and UM Dental School. Currently
I live in the town of Clarkston and have
42 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 6, 2012
.
an office in Davison. I began running in
the year 2000 to lose weight. I am an or-
dinary guy with an extraordinary desire
to make a difference. At the onset of this
mission I had run 11 marathons, all in
the range of3:35 down to 2:55.... Mter
superficially committing to this mission,
I soon discovered the devil was in the de-
tails. . . . Was I born to do this? Hardly.
As a high schooler, I did play tennis, but
HATED to run. My teammates and I
never ran as far as the coach told us to or
thought we had."
There was another, poignant motiva-
tion behind "the mission." Litton and his
wife, Lisa, an attorney, were the parents
of two boys and a girl. The youngest, Mi-
chael, was born, in 2001, with cystic
fibrosis. A congenital illness, it most
commonly clogs airways in the lungs,
making breathing difficult. The average
life expectancy for cystic-fibrosis patients
is about thirty-eight years. Litton wrote,
"The goal is to raise a QUARTER MILLION
DOLLARS for CF during the course of the
mission." His site featured the logo of the
Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and people
were invited to make donations by click-
ing on a link to the organization' s Web
site, bywriting a personal check to W orld-
recordrun, or by sending money to a Pay-
Pal account.
"My hope is that I can inspire others
to take inventory of their talents, find
their passion and pursue it relentlessly to
effect a cause or impact their commu-
nity," Litton wrote. "This is MY mission.
It is the only thing I feel passionately
about enough to ask you to PLEASE con-
sider a donation to this worthy cause. I
will also be bold enough to ask you to
please alert others to this site or send a
link to your e-mail list. When all is said
and done, no one will care about the end-
less hours of training, my detailed work-
out logs or fancy awards."
The compassion that Strode naturally
felt upon learning of a child's illness,
along with admiration for Litton's read-
iness to put his body on the line to raise
funds for MichaeYs future and for medi-
cal research, was tempered, he told me,
by his belief that Litton "had cheated in
almost all of his 2010 marathons."
O n July 24,2010, Strode received an
unexpected inquiry from Jennifer
Straughan, the Missoula race director,
who asked him to look at a photograph
of a runner wearing bib No. 759. It was
Litton. "There is some question as to
whether he was seen along the course,"
Straughan wrote. "He finished in a time
similar to you so theoretically you would
have noticed him."
While Strode had been immersed in
what he'd assumed was his own private
Kip Litton obsession, the official timer
at Missoula had been contacted by his
counterpart at the Deadwood Mickelson
Trail Marathon, in Deadwood, South
Dakota, where Litton had turned up the
previous month. Photographs taken in
Deadwood showed him crossing the
starting line fifth from last and finishing
in 2:55:50, putting him first in his age
group and in third place over all. The
fourth-place finisher protested: he'd been
running third at the halfway mark and
said that no one had passed him after
that, an assertion bolstered by the fact
that most of the remaining course was a
trail only six feet wide. Litton had regis-
tered a half-marathon split, and the
Deadwood timer was skeptical of the
protest against him-"I was trying to
prove Litton was legit," he told me-but
he changed his mind after determining
that Litton had, improbably, run the sec-
ond half eleven minutes faster than the
first. In addition, he found photographs